Chapter Maren
MAREN
Iwake to birdsong.
Not the sound I expected. I expected silence, or wind, or the settling groan of old stone. But there are birds in the ruins. Small ones, nesting in the cracks in the walls, and they are singing because the sun is up and the thing that lived here is gone.
Kovren is beside me. Still sitting upright against the hearth, still holding Rodvek's body. He hasn't moved all night. My arms are still wrapped around him from behind, my hands numb from gripping his shirt, my face stiff where it was pressed against his back.
I let go. Slowly. My fingers don't want to uncurl.
“Kovren.”
He doesn't answer. His eyes are open, red-rimmed, fixed on his brother's face. Rodvek looks smaller in the morning light. Peaceful. The sharp features are relaxed in a way they probably haven't been in eight years. He could be sleeping, if you didn't look too close.
“We need to bury him,” I say.
Kovren's throat works. He nods.
I stand. My body protests everything. The cold stone floor has locked my joints, and the anchor drain from last night has left me hollowed out, weak somewhere deeper than muscles. My hands are shaking. I press them flat against my thighs until they stop.
The garden. Between the training yard and the mess hall, where the mountain sage still grows. I don't have to say it. Kovren already knows.
He carries Rodvek himself. Lifts him from the floor of the great hall, one arm under his shoulders, one under his knees, and walks through the rubble to the narrow strip of earth where they used to sit together after training.
He moves slowly. Not from the weight. The body is lighter than it should be, hollowed by eight years of the berserker burning through everything that wasn't bone.
I pull the shovel from Mother Sanque's pack and Kovren reaches for it. His hand closes around the handle. Opens. Closes again, white-knuckled, and for a moment he has it. Then the tremor takes his whole arm and the shovel drops to the frozen ground between us.
He stares at his hand like it belongs to someone else.
I pick up the shovel. He doesn't fight me for it. Not because of his injuries, though the gash on his shoulder from Rodvek's blow needs stitching. Because something in him has broken open and his body knows it even if he won't say it.
So I dig. The earth is half-frozen and full of roots and stones, and the shovel is too big for my hands.
But I dig. Because this is what needs doing, and I am here, and the man I married can't.
Kovren sits beside the grave with Rodvek's body in his lap. He doesn't speak. Sometimes his lips move, but nothing comes out. I think he's saying goodbye in a language that isn't meant for me.
When the grave is deep enough, he lays Rodvek down. Gentle. The same care he uses for everything, the same measured control, even now, even broken open.
He folds Rodvek's hands across his chest and straightens the torn remains of his armor. The armor is just metal now. Not fused, not living. Just old, dented plates of steel.
I fill in the grave. Kovren kneels beside it and doesn't move until the last shovelful of earth settles.
“The sage will grow over it,” I say. “By spring.”
He puts his hand flat on the turned earth. Holds it there.
“Goodbye, brother,” he says. “Your oath is paid.”
I give him time. Sit on a broken stone a few feet away and check the supplies from my pack. My herbs are running low. The bandages Mother Sanque packed are good quality, enough to handle the gash on Kovren's shoulder and the smaller cuts from last night. The oil is half-empty.
When he stands, his face is different. Not lighter.
Not peaceful. But the thing that was grinding behind his eyes for all the days I've known him is gone.
The guilt is still there, and the grief is new and raw, but the relentless forward momentum of eight years of hunting has stopped. He looks lost.
I know that expression. I wore it when I left my village with my father's bag on my back and no idea where to go.
“Let me stitch that shoulder,” I say.
He sits. I work. The wound is deep but clean, the same kind of claw damage I stitched in the ditch on the first day. My hands are steady. They always are, when there's work to do.
“What now?” he asks while I stitch. His voice is rough from the night. From the crying.
“Now we go somewhere warm and I sleep for about three days.”
“Maren.”
“Vorneth,” I say. “Mother Sanque is waiting. She wants to hear what the stone felt like. And she'll want to examine us both after last night.”
“And after that?”
I tie off the last stitch. Sit back. Look at him.
He's looking at his hands. The way he does when he's trying to figure out what they're for, now that the thing they were built to do is finished.
“After that,” I say, “we figure it out.”
“I don't know how to do that.” He turns his hands over, palms up. “I've been hunting for eight years. I don't know how to stop.”
“You learn. The same way you learned everything else. One day at a time. One thing at a time.” I put my hand on his knee. “I've been walking for eight years. I don't know how to stop either. So we'll learn. Together or separately or badly. But we'll learn.”
He covers my hand with his. The size difference is absurd. My whole hand vanishes under his palm.
“Vorneth,” he says.
“Vorneth.”
We pack. Leave the ruins behind. Walk down the mountain toward the pass. The air is sharp with frost, and the sky is the kind of blue that hurts to look at.
He carries both packs. I carry the empty oil jar and the map, folded small in my pocket. The cloak drags behind me on the trail, collecting pine needles and frost.
I don't look back at the stronghold. Neither does he.
Six months later, I am arguing with a goat.
The goat belongs to Tomas, our neighbor, and it has eaten the herbs I planted beside the front door. Again. I am standing in the yard with dirt on my hands and murder in my heart, and the goat is looking at me with the supreme indifference that only a goat can achieve.
“That was rosemary,” I tell it. “Medicinal rosemary. Do you have any idea how long it takes to establish a rosemary plant at this altitude?”
The goat chews.
From inside the house, I hear Kovren laugh.
It's still a new sound. Six months and I'm still not used to it. Low, quiet, a rumble that I feel through the floor more than hear through the walls. He laughs more now. Not often. Not easily. But more.
He comes to the door. Has to duck through it. The house was built for normal people, and normal people don't need nine feet of clearance. He's talked about raising the lintels. I've told him that if he knocks himself unconscious one more time on the kitchen beam, I'm going to let him lie there.
“The goat is back,” I say.
“I see that.”
“It ate my rosemary.”
“I see that too.” He leans against the doorframe, arms folded, filling the entire opening.
There's sawdust on his arms and wood shavings in his hair.
He's been splitting logs for the surgery stove.
My surgery stove, in the room at the back of the house that Mother Sanque helped me set up, with a proper examination table and shelves for my supplies and a window that faces the mountain.
“Are you going to help?”
“You seem to have it under control.”
“Kovren.”
He crosses the yard in two strides, picks up the goat with one hand, and sets it over the low stone wall that separates our yard from Tomas's. The goat bleats in protest. Kovren points at it.
“Stay.”
The goat stays. It will be back tomorrow. We both know this.
He looks down at the decimated rosemary. At my dirty hands. At me, kneeling in the garden in my work clothes, hair tied back, soil under my fingernails.
“I'll build a fence,” he says.
“You said that last month.”
“I'll build it tomorrow.”
“You said that last week.”
“Maren.”
“Build the fence, Kovren.”
He kneels beside me. Even on his knees he's taller than I am standing. He picks up a sprig of rosemary the goat dropped and tucks it behind my ear.
“I'll build the fence,” he says. “Today. Now. If you stop looking at me with that expression.”
“What expression?”
“The one that makes me want to build you a fence and a wall and a house and whatever else you need.”
“I just need the fence.”
“Then you'll have a fence.” He kisses the top of my head, stands, goes to get the lumber.
I watch him cross the yard. He moves differently now. Looser. Less guarded. He still checks exits when we go into town. Still positions himself between me and strangers. Still folds himself smaller in crowds. But the tension is gone. The constant bracing against the thing inside him.
The beast is gone. Mother Sanque confirmed it three months ago, during one of her visits. Put her hands on his chest, closed her eyes, opened them, and said “Empty.”
“Empty,” Kovren repeated.
“The berserker space. Where the rage lived. It's just you in there now.” She'd looked at him with those sharp eyes, softer than I'd ever seen them. “How does that feel?”
“Strange,” he'd said. “Quiet.”
“Get used to it.”
She comes every two weeks. Climbs down from her house at the top of the stairs, walks to ours at the bottom, sits in the chair by the fire and drinks the tea Kovren makes.
She critiques the tea every time. He's getting better at it.
He no longer boils it to the consistency of ditch water, which I consider progress and Mother Sanque considers barely adequate.
She brought a patient last week. A woman from the next valley with a joint disease Mother Sanque couldn't treat alone.
We worked on her together, Mother Sanque's knowledge and my hands, and when the woman left with less pain than she'd had in years, Mother Sanque sat in the chair and drank her tea and said nothing.
Which, from her, is the highest compliment.